Google Loses a Round In Suit By “Disappeared” Website

On May 12, 2016, a Federal Court in Florida refused to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that Google’s various statements about its search results, including that “[i]t is Google’s policy not to censor search results,” are false, deceptive and misleading. 1

The case pits Florida company E-Ventures Worldwide, LLC against the search giant. The chief complaint is that Google, contrary to its public pronouncements, made all of the company’s websites disappear from all possible Google search results. 2 Since Google controls 70% of the U.S. search market and 90% of the European search market, 3 this is equivalent to making the websites virtually disappear from the internet.

In September of 2014, Google manually removed 231 of Plaintiff’s websites from its search results.

“As a result of Google’s removal of E-ventures websites, [its] websites could not be located on Google.com the world’s most widely used search engines.” 4

“E-ventures websites were not only removed from Google.com’s search results, but were also removed from all [G]oogle affiliated websites and from third party websites participating in Google’s advertising program.” 5

In that event, the only way you could find them, was to know the exact URL of the website.

And if the little site hadn’t had the spine to sue Google, you’d never know about them, either.